Featured Tracks:

Every Toro Y Moi album promises to be vastly different than what came before it, and Boo Boo is no different. “My baby got fed up with my ego/Wasn’t even thinkin’ we were goin’ worldwide/Thinking it was better than the Southern life,” Chaz Bear sings on “No Show,” a line Drake somehow didn't get to first. Though Bear (fka Chaz Bundick) has always tried to keep a low profile both on and off record, Boo Boo is his first album that dares to feed a narrative: in a recent interview, he copped to the dissolution of a relationship he likened to “an acid trip,” becoming more outspoken about his mixed race heritage, and getting freaked out by indie rock fame that only appears modest. In reality, he’s out here realistically emulating grandiose Pink Floyd concert films and celebrating Chaz Bundick Day in a city (Berkeley) where he’s lived for less than five years. Save the Underneath the Pine album cover, Toro Y Moi has never given us anything as juicy as the backstory of Boo Boo; and yet, it’s a record where Bear’s sonic inspiration can feel dry.

Boo Boo was teased by the bubbly roller-rink pop of “Girl Like You,” and it leads off with an impressive Prince homage, “Mirage,” complete with pitch-perfect spoken asides. In this mode, Boo Boo plays towards Bear’s increasing comfort as a lead vocalist and a lead personality, something hard to imagine when he was submerged into the aqueous Dilla homages on Causers of This. But that kind of funk doesn’t mesh with the other kind of funk more indicative of Bear’s mindset during Boo Boo’s creation. The airlocked ambience of “No Show” captures the overarching spirit—an inert, beatless drone interrupted by erratic blurts of synth-bass, a snapshot from the Uncanny Valley Sim-worlds created on Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven.

Though the waterlogged sampledelia of Causers of This has little stylistic resemblance to the surprising turn to trad-indie rock on 2015’s What For?, Bear’s aesthetic has been unified by its humidity. It has allowed Toro Y Moi albums to blend into the situations where one might expect to hear them: BBQs, rooftop dance parties, 4 p.m. slots at summer festivals. Given the circumstances, the sunlight of the spirit has understandably dimmed on Boo Boo, an indoors album where the dominant tactile sensation is air conditioning, a harsh, artificial chill. While Toro Y Moi has slowly expanded to a live sextet, much of their fifth record is given to the inorganic sounds of lonely computing. No matter how often the production tactics of 1980s pop continue to be repurposed, you may not hear an indie record in 2017 more reliant on synthesized toms than Boo Boo.

But the momentum generated by “Mirage” and the equally limber funk workouts that bookend Boo Boo end up compensating for the tedious midsection of neither-here-nor-there experimentation. The songs are too overstuffed to make good on Bear’s ambient leanings, too hookless to merit the patience of repetition. “Got me starin’ out my window,” he sings rather appropriately through Auto-Tune, and Boo Boo will join you in a rut if you’re on that level. If not, the repurposed weird science can just as easily feel like sitting in a particularly avant-garde dentist’s office. Centerpiece “Don’t Try” finds Toro Y Moi as a circa-1982 connector between Prince’s plasticine pop experiments and the ashy dirges of the Cure on Faith and Pornography. It’s a pretty good trick, though it’s not enough to support the record’s weakest, most insistently pushed melody, with which Bear snitches on himself: “Give me no ideas I just waste them.”

This moment of self-pity doesn’t totally ring true; Bear’s ideas aren’t entirely in vain on Boo Boo. Since What For?, Bear has been more productive than ever, but his workaholic instincts caught him at a vulnerable yet uninspired state here. The silver lining for breakups, of course, is that they can put songwriters in touch with emotions that might be inaccessible in more stable times—unchecked spite, utter devastation, vengeful hope. Then again, breakups can also just suck really hard in a boring way—of barely wanting to leave the house—and there’s nothing you can do to romanticize it. On that level, the art of Boo Boo imitates life.